War and Peace: An Overanalysis of "The Name of the Doctor"

My Friend (and co-blogger at T9YD) Adam:   I assume you're writing War and Peace right now?

Me: Oh yes! So much to analyze. So much to hate.

Steve:  What I'm saying is, after the John Hurt part--
Susan:  No, no, no, Steve!  Can we just clear this up once and for all:  Alien is not 'really about parenthood.'
Steve:  Well...
Susan:  For just this once, could we manage to discuss childbirth without involving John Hurt.
Steve:  Susan!  No man can do that!
Susan:  Okay.
Steve:  I mean, imagine what it's like for John Hurt.
Susan:  Oh please, can we not!
Steve:  If he was visiting a maternity ward all the guys in obstetrics would be crowding round going "Hey, it's da man!  Cheers, John, you're the one that got me into this racket."

-Coupling, Season 4, Episode 1, "9 1/2 Minutes," written by Steven Moffat

Sometimes, if you sift through episodes of Moffat's brilliant sitcom, Coupling, you can see where some of his motivations in writing Doctor Who really come from.  Here, we see why he cast John Hurt as the estranged 9th-ish Doctor.  If you watch an episode called "Size Matters," I guarantee you that you will never hear the Doctor say "Geronimo" in quite the same way again.

The "John Hurt Moment"

Moffat is a talented writer, and there's so much evidence to support that.  He has bounced between genres freely, succeeding in nearly all of them, from children's programming (Press Gang), to sex comedy (Coupling), to horror (Jekyll), to popular, American animated films (Tintin), to a modern day adaptation of classic literature (Sherlock), to taking the reigns of the greatest science-fiction franchise in British history.  While he's made a few slight missteps (Jekyll, his short lived sitcom Chalk, and some parts of the 4th season of Coupling), he's an excellent writer all around.  He wrote an episode for each of the first four seasons of the revived series, and each one won or was nominated for a major award.  When he took over the show, he had a monumental task ahead of him, recasting the Doctor after the wildly successful David Tennant era whose popularity may never be surpassed.  Rather than try to copy his predecessor, Russel T. Davies, he took the entire show in a different direction, constructing a multi-year long arc that has kept the show extremely popular, despite all of the whiny teenage girls insisting that David Tennant be brought back.  He created some of the most complex and satisfying individual episodes, as well as the greatest overarching stories that this show has ever seen.  He has been, in my opinion, the best writer that the franchise has ever seen, and that's including both Neil Gaiman and Douglas Adams.

It is because of all of these things that I must say the following with a very, very heavy heart:

Steven Moffat has lost his touch.  At least with Doctor Who.

This season has been a disappointment from the beginning.  "Asylum of the Daleks" was fun if you ignored the fact that the very premise of it made no sense whatsoever.  "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" was fun but idiotic.  "The Angels Take Manhattan" was the first Angels episode without a strong internal logic to it that tied up the loose ends perfectly. Two of the greatest companions in the history of the series were unceremoniously ejected in the midst of a two-part episode that was uncomfortably shoved into 45 minutes like a 300 pound man uncomfortably shoved into a speedo.  "The Snowmen" and "The Bells of Saint John" gave us hope for a better season, only for those hopes to be dashed by the uncompelling "Rings of Something or Other," the disappointing "Hide," the embarassingly horrible "The Crimson Horror," and an episode that is an insult to the very name of Neil Gaiman, "Nightmare in Silver."

GF:  Do you have to pace around the room like there's a war on while you discuss Doctor Who?  Sit down and discuss it with me like a normal person.

I understand a lot of people loved this episode, including my co-bloggers over at The 900 Year Diary, Adam Stone and Kevin Spak.  Normally Spak and I disagree about Doctor Who, but it's normally me loving the episode that he hates, not the other way around.  I have no idea how this episode is becoming so popular.  With the exception of the last 30 seconds, this episode was a convoluted mess?

"The Name of the Doctor" will hopefully go down in Doctor Who history as Moffat's worst episode, as I hope he never produces anything as convoluted and nonsensical as this episode.  After hearing for almost 2 years that the Doctor's name must never be said, it was barely consequential to the episode.  The title, "The Name of the Doctor," in the end, seemed to have nothing to do with the actual "question," but was a trick phrase to refer to something we weren't thinking of.  The prophesy was not fulfilled.  Dorium said that, on the fields of Trenzalore, no living being can fail to speak or answer falsely.  Well, that didn't fucking happen.  The Doctor was asked his name point blank and failed to answer.  River had to answer for him so that the door could be opened.  It's like Moffat changed his mind about what this episode was going to be after "The Wedding of River Song" had already aired.

GF:  The only good thing about this episode so far is that River is in it.

What the fuck, River?  We were told we would be seeing a "post-Library" River, which was true, but it was pulled off in the most disappointing way possible.  Somehow River can be brought into conversation with the Doctor and other people from her home in the computer in the Library?  That's convenient.  A pre-library River would have been much less convoluted.  River was not entirely necessary in this episode, other than the fact that every Moffat season finale seems to have to have River in it as a requirement.  I love River, but she added nothing to this episode.

The fact that the Doctor was forced to go to his grave would have been interesting, if pulled off successfully.  Moffat said, in an interview after "The Impossible Astronaut," how fascinating he found it that, however far the Doctor travelled, he was moving through all of time and space, and somewhere out there is his grave.  He could always stumble upon it.  Fascinating concept, if it weren't for the fact that Dorium told us it was going to be something fundamentally different.

"It's like my mother always said:  The soufflé isn't the soufflé, the soufflé is the recipe."

Shut up, Moffat.  I know you think that's a profound metaphor for Clara scattering herself over the Doctor's timeline, but it's not.  It's a tortured metaphor that doesn't really work.

Clara's splintering across his timeline was a bizarre explanation.  It works for the ways she saved him in "Asylum of the Daleks" and "The Snowmen," but how did she save him from all the other times that the Great Intelligence tried to kill him?  The only explanation is that the reason we've never seen Clara or the Great Intelligence in any of the classic series episodes is because they didn't reflect the altered timeline that the GI changed.  But that doesn't make sense because, if that were true, we'd never have seen Clara in either the Asylum or Victorian London.  Was she always just hiding in the shadows every time the GI covertly tried to kill the Doctor off-screen, battling him and winning for over 900 years?  That seems highly unlikely.

And somehow Clara could jump into the time stream and make those echoes, but since the Doctor went in (went in where?) and saved her, the echoes still exist, but the original Clara doesn't die?  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.  Was Moffat tripping when he wrote this episode?  And the entire time between writing and production when he could have fixed the episode?

Furthermore, the sacrifice Clara made was a bit ridiculous because she doesn't seem to have enough loyalty to the Doctor yet to justify such an immense sacrifice.  The mystery of Clara drove a huge spike between the Doctor and Clara, and really kept them from developing a strong chemistry.  Now that they know so much about each other, hopefully that chemistry will really develop over the course of the next season.  But so far, I don't buy that she cared about the Doctor enough to sacrifice her life for him. Amy would have.  Rose would have.  Even Martha or Donna would have.  Clara isn't there yet, and it didn't seem plausible.

The brief glimpses at all of the past Doctors was excellent, and it looks like this might be the closest we'll ever get to a 12 Doctors special.  I started yelling out each Doctor's number as they passed by, until my girlfriend asked me to stop.  What I thought was interesting is that, while Clara adjusted her outfit in each era to make it appropriate to the time, some of her outfits looked suspiciously similar to outfits worn by the Doctor's companions.  The one existing in the same time as the 6th Doctor had an outfit that did not match either of 6's companions in any way.  But the one following the 2nd Doctor seemed to have the same outfit as the 2nd Doctor's companion, Victoria.  And the one following the 7th Doctor looks a lot like the 7th Doctor's best companion, Ace.  Even the 1st Doctor Clara looked a little Susan-ish.  I was hoping to find out that Clara was actually Susan, since the expanded universe suggests that Susan might not be his actual granddaughter, just some girl he picked up to travel with him.  I call this the "Amber Alert TARDIS" theory.

GF:  Why is this guy so intent on revenge against the Doctor?  It would be one thing if he was a central villain throughout the season who was responsible for nearly everything in the season.  We didn't see enough for him to have this kind of vendetta against the Doctor.
Me:  Yeah.  He was an old 2nd Doctor villain, but even if you factor that in, this is only the Doctor's fifth time meeting him.

Good point, honey!  While Clara's sacrifice for the Doctor is a bit of a stretch, the GI's strong desire for revenge against the Doctor is just as much of a stretch, if not more of one.  The GI doesn't have enough of a history with the Doctor to be that hellbent on revenge.  There are tons of enemies that Moffat could have used that would have made more sense in that situation, including the most drop dead obvious choice of them all:  The Master.  But Moffat apparently wanted to use a more obscure villain, even though The Master would have made his whole story arc make sense.

GF:  This season sucked.  There wasn't even a good plot arc that led to this.
Me:  Yeah.  As much as I loved Amy and Rory, I have to admit that it was a mistake to keep them on for half a season.  The first half of the season revolved around their departure so much that they didn't even bother to get the real story of the season going until they left.

That's five episodes that could have been used to better set up this episode, and five episodes that were completely wasted in the process.  They couldn't even make the Great Intelligence the villain in some Amy and Rory episodes?  He wouldn't have to be the primary villain, he could just be someone lurking behind the villain, the secret, silent partner to someone.  But instead, we were given two mysteries (the name, and Clara) that were never developed, just reiterated in dialogue.  Actually, Clara's mystery was reiterated in dialogue without developing the plot any further.  The Doctor's name has barely been mentioned since "The Wedding of River Song," which aired nearly two years ago.  Good luck if you didn't remember that episode.

In the mire of stupidity that was "The Name of the Doctor," Moffat nearly redeemed himself with the last 30 seconds, which did exactly what Moffat said the episode would do:  change Doctor Who forever.  Because now there's a whole other Doctor in there that we never knew about it.  It also means we have a whole new Doctor to learn about, and he's going to be a big part of the 50th anniversary special.  John Hurt was announced as a cast member for the 50th Anniversary special months ago, but I never imagined he'd be a Doctor.  It has rocked my world in a way that I never expected.  My mind has been so set in an 11th Doctor world.  I wasn't prepared to meet another Doctor in this episode, let alone a previous Doctor.  The chronology of the Doctor's lives is stored in a large part of my brain, and I've just been told that there a huge and important chunk in the middle of there that I never imagined was there.  It's a matter of cognitive dissonance.  I'm literally going to need until November 23rd, the date of the big Special, to fully accept this radical change in Doctor Who chronology.  Seriously, this is a matter of letting my brain recover.  It really knocked me on my ass.

But even in rocking the entire franchise, Moffat did it in the most ridiculously convoluted way possible.  I'm sorry to have to admit this, but my girlfriend actually had to explain the ending to me.

(The episode ends)
Me:  (Throws a pillow in the direction) What the fuck was that?!
GF:  I got it.
Me:  You did?
GF:  You've never seen what happened in the Time War, right?
Me:  No.  Even the expanded Universe stuff hasn't touched it.
GF:  Yeah.  That's the Doctor during the Time War.
Me:  But that makes the current Doctor the 12th?  How can that be?
GF:  Because he doesn't acknowledge him as the Doctor.  He said he didn't do things in the name of the Doctor, so he isn't a real Doctor.
Me:  So he ignores him in the numbering system, and that's why he calls himself the 11th, even though he's actually the 12th.

So, here's a list of things that have significantly changed due to the ending of "The Name of the Doctor":

-The last 3 Doctors' numbers, even if they don't acknowledge them, are all bumped forward by 1 number.  Eccleston was now the 10th Doctor.  Tennant the 11th.  Smith the 12th.
-The Doctor can only regenerate 12 times, meaning that there can only be 13 Doctors.  This means that, after Matt Smith, the Doctor can only have one more regeneration before they have to at least acknowledge that the Doctor should be out of regenerations (if they don't decide to just ignore it like Davies planned to).
-The 8th and 9th Doctors* probably didn't spend much, if any time, in the Time War.  The 9th Doctor appeared to have just been regenerating in "Rose," acting as if he had just seen himself in the mirror for the first time.  The 10th Doctor said that he had to finally destroy the Time Lords to keep them from becoming God-like creatures, destroying the rest of the Universe so they could exist as the only creatures, in pure consciousness.  I feel like this is probably the true chronology:  The 8th Doctor regenerated early in the Time War into True 9.  True 9 had a change of heart towards the end, and destroyed the Time Lords, forcing him to regenerate into 9 in the process.  Alternately, True 9 might have regenerated into 9 before he destroyed the Time Lords, and his regeneration caused his radical change of heart.
-The 50th Anniversary special will actually have a past Doctor other than 10, it's just not a Doctor we knew about.
-If John Hurt has already been cast for the 50th Anniversary special (we have), then True 9 is going to be a sort of a villain in the special.
-The Doctor is even older than he claims.  The 6th Doctor claimed to be 900 years old, and so did the 11th Doctor at the beginning of his regeneration.  So the Doctor had to be much older than 900 at the beginning of his 11th regeneration.  This might explain the lie better, because there's an entire regeneration he doesn't acknowledge.  How many years did True 9 live?  Because however many years True 9 lived, the Doctor is probably subtracting those years from the age he claims to be.

There's so much to be learned about True 9, and I can't wait to see what happens with him.  The Doctor's hatred of True 9 seems to be a little irrational.  When True 9 said he did everything he did in the name of peace and sanity, the 11th Doctor didn't disagree with him.  He said it wasn't "in the name of the Doctor."  I could understand the 11th Doctor being mad at him if he thought everything True 9 did was wrong.  But it seems like he knows that True 9 had to do what he had to do, he's just pushing him to the back of his mind so he can ignore it.  Some of us don't have the ability to section off our past and leave it behind, Doctor.  You need to deal with True 9.

I'm guessing this is what we can expect from the 50th Anniversary.

Until then, I'll still be updating, just not with episode reviews.  But stay tuned!  Can't wait for Season 8.

*Since the introduction of another Doctor complicates the numbering system so much, I'm going to come up with my only special system.  I'm still going to refer to Eccleston's Doctor as 9, Tennant's as 10, Smith's as 11.  I'm going to call John Hurt's Doctor "True 9."

You Don't Love Me, You Love Magazines: An Operation Blue Harvest Update

Things have been pretty quiet here at The Horror this week.  It's been a very emotionally taxing week in my life.  But a new issue of Doctor Who Magazine just came out, and it gave us some big information about both the season finale and the 50th Anniversary special.  I should probably subscribe to DWM, but for the time being, a Google News alert for "doctor who" seems to be working just fine.

Although I would like to have as many framed pictures of Matt Smith as possible.
In a totally heterosexual way.

Let's start with the season finale...

The Name of the Doctor

I got this all from Blogtor Who.

Like I predicted, Vastra, Strax, and Jenny are all coming back.  When the episode description said that the Doctor's "friends" would be captured and taken to the fields of Trenzalore, I figured it had to be more than just Clara.

Richard E. Grant is coming back in this episode as a "posthumous" Dr. Simeon, which I think we all know means that the Great Intelligence is the main villain of the episode.  This is further confirmed with a quote that has been revealed from the episode.  "How's the intelligence--still great?" - The Doctor.

Clara's true identity will be revealed in this particular episode.  Does this mean her weirdness is linked to the Doctor's real name?  That might explain why the TARDIS showed Clara the Doctor's real name. It might be a clue that she needed to hear.  We've seen the TARDIS give clues about the future before ("The only water in the forest is the river"), and we know that it can predict the future.  There's no doubt that the TARDIS knows who Clara is, hence why it doesn't like her.  Although it seemed to like her enough to save her...

Okay, so most of that is stuff we already knew.  But here's the bombshell:  Not only will River be there...it's going to be a "post-[L]ibrary" River!  It seems that the word "impossible" means very little on this show.  River seemed to be clearly killed in "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead."  How on Earth has she survived?  One possibility is that she somehow faked her death.  Why that would be necessary is beyond me.  Another possibility is that she hasn't actually given up all of her regenerations after all.  Will we be see a future regeneration of River in this episode?  Or possibly some other time in the future?

Another interesting idea is the fact that, just because the Doctor "saved" River's consciousness in "Forest of the Dead," doesn't necessarily mean she had to die there.  A version of her consciousness could easily have been "saved" even if she wasn't about to die.  Somehow, River found a way to survive, but an echo of her consciousness was still on the sonic screwdriver.  Or maybe her consciousness found a way out of the Library computer.

The magazine also reported that not everyone will make it out of this episode alive.  Hopefully the person to die will be someone relatively inconsequential, like Jenny.  We'll see.  It would be pretty cruel to bring a post-Library River back and then kill her off again immediately afterwards.  But Moffat has said that he has an "endgame" for River.  Who knows what that means.

Now, on to...

The 50th Anniversary Special

Doctor Who Magazine also reported that David Tennant is without a doubt the only Doctor coming back.  I still stand by Rule 1.  It stands proudly as the subtitle of this blog.  It's absolutely possible that Moffat is lying.  Doctor Who Magazine is not opposed to lying on Moffat's behalf.  When "The Impossible Astronaut" was coming out, DWM had 4 collectable covers, each one with a different main character on it:  River, Amy, Rory, and the Doctor.  The headline said that one of them would die, and this time it wasn't a trick.  Clearly, it was a trick.  We all know that the Doctor's escape from the Silence was absolutely a trick.  So maybe they're lying.

However, we have to begin preparing ourselves for the possibility that this isn't a lie.  If that's the case, we all need to remember that David Tennant and Matt Smith paired together in the same episode is an awesome thing!  If we had to choose only one past Doctor to bring back for the special, my number one choice would be David Tennant.  Tennant's cool as a cucumber Doctor will contrast well against Smith's bumbling hipster version of the same character.

However, io9 dug up a brief 19 second video of the filming that clearly shows the crew filming an old fashioned police constable walking past the I.M. Foreman scrap yard at 76 Trotter's Lane.  For those of you who don't know, that's the exact shot that the first episode of the classic series opened with.  It looks like, somehow, we're returning to the beginning.  While Moffat says he wants to move the series forward at all times, the little tidbits that we get from behind the scenes show that that's not entirely true.  The villains are going to be the Zygons, the 10th Doctor will return, and we're going back to Trotter's Lane where it all began.

Even if we don't see the return of any Doctors before Tennant, there's nothing that stops them from bringing back other characters.  Carole Anne Ford, who played the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan, and William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton, remain the only original cast members from 1963 that are still alive.  Either of them would be a perfect addition to this episode, especially if the episode is going back to Trotter's Lane.  Someone else has to come back, even if it isn't a Doctor.

You know what would be a great idea for a special?  "The Five Masters."

While I've been saying that I think Susan will come back soon, and I still think there's a good chance of it, I have one concern.  I've recently started to listen to and read expanded universe material.  In Eighth Doctor adventures, Susan meets her grandfather again.  I used to say that we can't claim that expanded universe is cannon, but since there are actually a lot fewer contradictions between expanded universe and television than I thought, I'm starting to view those stories as all cannon.  This is not to say that a return of Susan can't happen without contradicting the Eighth Doctor adventures, I can't imagine that it wouldn't contradict it.  If you bring back Susan, you have to have the conversation about how the Doctor left her behind.

Tomorrow, my least favorite Doctor Who writer is going to be writing an episode that looks really boring.  Let's hope I'm wrong.

The Great Intelligence: A Doctor Who Book Report

SPOILERS!

In the midst of two conference papers, trying to move, being sick and needing a lot of rest, and attending a conference in town on media reform, it’s been hard to find time to rewatch all of the Great Intelligence’s past episodes.  It doesn’t help that, while there are only two GI stories in official canon (one in questionable canon), the two stories are in the 2^nd Doctor era where they were perfectly fine with saying “Yes, we’ll split this into six half-hour episodes.”  The two stores were each 3 hours long.  And both of them have been mostly lost to the BBC purge, with cruddy looking recons taking their place.  Plus, while it’s technically two 6-part stories, the two stories are intertwined, making it an unofficial 12-part episode.  If you throw in the one questionable canon film (Downtime), it’s practically a trilogy. So it’s been tough to go back and do the research.  But I got it done.  So now, a little bit about the Great Intelligence:

This is how the 2nd Doctor explained the Great Intelligence to (then Colonel) Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart:

"Well, I wish I could give you a precise answer. Perhaps the best way to describe it is a sort of formless, shapeless thing floating about in space like a cloud of mist, only with a mind and will."

The 2^nd Doctor first met the Great Intelligence in Tibet in the 1930s.  He landed at a monastery where he hoped to meet an old friend, the head monk there.  Also hanging out at the monastery was a man named Professor Travers, who had gone to Tibet to find the elusive Yeti, a.k.a. “The Abominable Snowmen.”  They found a good share of Yeti, but it turned out that they were actually robot Yeti.  The Yeti were being controlled by a few of the monks, but the monks were being controlled by the GI.

The Great Intelligence showed an ability to take over the minds of humans, much like Kizlet and her minions in “The Bells of Saint John.”  Although it seemed to be a different type of mind control in “The Bells of Saint John.”  Most people who were controlled by the Great Intelligence in the 2^nd Doctor era were a literal mouthpiece for the Great Intelligence.  He (or it, not sure how you refer to it) seems to have found some subtler form of mind control.  Although Dr. Simeon, while subject to some subtle mind control for most of his life, after he had been attacked by the memory word was turned into a GI mouthpiece.

What was interesting was that, in the Great Intelligence’s first episode, “The Abominable Snowmen,” the GI’s plan was not really revealed.  He was trying to create a small army of robot Yeti, but we didn’t know what it was about.  We just heard, from one of the possessed monks, that the GI was doing this simply as an experiment.  A pilot project, preparing for something bigger.  While not a satisfying ending, there was a reason for that:  they already had its second story prepared.  In a strange move for the history of Doctor Who, three stories later, in the exact same season, the episode “The Web of Fear” picked up the story 30 years later, after Professor Travers has brought back a Yeti robot for a museum, and his attempt to figure out how to reactivate one without the GI’s control attracted the Great Intelligence to come back.  That’s when we saw what its real plan was.

The Great Intelligence had been following the Doctor through time and space, observing how brilliant the Doctor was.  So he had created a machine specifically to drain the Doctor’s mind out of his body, leaving the Doctor with the mind of a child.  The Doctor crossed the wires on the machine so that, when the switch was thrown, the Doctor would absorb the Great Intelligence’s mind instead of the other way around.  This would have killed off the Great Intelligence, but the Doctor failed to inform his companions of his plan (he still needs to work on that), so they rescued him from the machine before the Doctor’s plan was carried out.  So the Great Intelligence was left alive.

Downtime is hilariously dumb.  My first impression was that this had to have been directed by someone who was moonlighting from his day job where he directed instructional videos for driver’s ed classes.  But, I looked it up, and it turns out that the director was actually a very long time director who had directed episodes from all the way back in the 1^st Doctor era through to the 4^th Doctor era.  The episode was very silly because the Great Intelligence’s plan was much stupider:  he just wanted to take over the world.  He had started a college that was a very thin front for a cult that worshiped him.  He managed to control their minds not unlike the way he controlled Kizlet and her minions.  The episode was interesting in that it brought back the Yeti and Professor Travers, as well as the Brigadier, who had been introduced in “The Web of Fear” before becoming one of the most iconic characters in the history of the show, and Victoria, the Doctor’s companion both times  he met the Great Intelligence.  It also had Sarah Jane Smith just because people love Sarah Jane.

Downtime may be silly, but what I do know for sure is that Moffat has seen it.  Two reasons why:  The first is that he brought Kate Lethbridge-Stewart back (well, he didn’t write the episode, but he was showrunner when she was introduced).  Kate appears in Downtime, played by a different actress, but it’s believable that they could be the same person.  Strangely in Downtime she was a single mother living in a trailer and not doing well.  How she went from that to heading U.N.I.T. is beyond me.  But her character was introduced in Downtime, and came back in another questionable canon film (Dæmos Rising), then appeared in two novels.  “The Power of Three” was her first officially canon appearance, and it appears that that means that Downtime is now official canon.  The other reason it’s clear that Moffat has seen Downtime is because in “The Bells of Saint John,” the Great Intelligence knew what U.N.I.T. was.  U.N.I.T. was originally formed in response to the Great Intelligence’s attack on London in “The Web of Fear,” but that happened after the episode so he couldn’t have known what it was unless he met them in Downtime.

I’ve noticed a few strictly aesthetic similarities between the 11^th Doctor’s Great Intelligence episodes and the 2^nd Doctor’s.  The first is that, where the 2^nd Doctor met the Great Intelligence as it was controlling “Abominable Snowmen,” the 11^th Doctor met it when it was controlling regular snowmen.  The name of the episodes were surprisingly similar:  “The Abominable Snowmen” and “The Snowmen.”  Funnily enough, “The Snowmen” is the first time the Great Intelligence didn’t have the Yeti as his army (at least in visual media, but I refuse to read the novels just for research).  The beginning of “The Bells of Saint John” featured the Doctor in a monastery, which is where the 2^nd Doctor first met the Great Intelligence.  And, finally, “The Bells of Saint John” seems a lot like another pilot project.  Like the Great Intelligence was just experimenting for something much, much bigger.

How much the Great Intelligence remembers of the 2^nd Doctor now is somewhat unclear.  It didn’t seem to recognize the Doctor in “The Snowmen,” but it certainly knew who he was in “The Bells of Saint John.”  It almost seems as if we’re looking at a different creature called “The Great Intelligence.”  (But, of course, that isn’t the case.)  The Doctor seems to have trouble remembering what the Great Intelligence is because, at the end of “The Snowmen,” he simply says that the name sounds familiar.  But don’t for get that it’s possible that as much as a millennium has passed in the Doctor’s timeline between the 2^nd and 11^th Doctors.  I can’t remember all of my friends in high school.  I don’t know how I’d remember anything from a millennium ago if I could live that long.

The blog Life, Doctor Who, and Combom, recently brought to my attention the fact that BBC South Africa recently released the one-line descriptions of all the plots of the episodes this season.  The last episode of the season, the title of which has yet to be released, is described as such:

“Someone is kidnapping the Doctor's friends, leading him towards the one place in all of time and space that he should never go.”

I think it’s pretty obvious that this means someone is trying to bring the Doctor to the fields of Trenzalore where he’ll be forced to say his name when it’s asked.  I have no doubt that that’s what this description means.  But is it the Great Intelligence who’s going to be leading him there?  If so…why?